


Case Two: Pest Control

by shadedScribe



Series: Cases From The Weird Files [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society (Homestuck), Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, But not today, Gen, Gratuitous monster-designing, bad Latin, but again: not today, someday i'll post a fic at a reasonable hour, someday i'll write a fic without a fight scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22905817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadedScribe/pseuds/shadedScribe
Summary: New York's sewers have a pest problem, and it's a lot worse than the usual rats and alligators. Fortunately, the private detectives of M. Peixes, A. Serket, and P. Maryam are on the case.
Relationships: None
Series: Cases From The Weird Files [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1646455
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Case Two: Pest Control

**Author's Note:**

> My laptop tried to stop me from posting this by crashing like five times, but I persevered. Here you go.

It was an oppressively hot and sunny June day in New York City, and Meenah Peixes was on the hunt.

Over the last few weeks, there had been a serious uptick of assorted monsters in the city’s sewers and tunnels. Of course, the sewers always had a few monsters in them no matter what, but when tentacles started popping out of the storm drains to grab at passing ankles, it was a bit of a problem. The city government had ignored said problem until it couldn’t, then with much fanfare had sent down fifty of New York’s Finest to take care of it.

After only twenty-nine and a half came back, they sent the job out to the professionals.

And so, here Meenah was. Ordinarily she would have been annoyed about being down in the sewers (even if it was a storm sewer instead of a sanitary sewer, New York wasn’t exactly clean), but in this weather, the cool and damp was almost a relief. It would have been uncomfortably dark for a human, but Meenah’s senses were adapted for the abyssal depths; she might as well have been walking down the street. Not that it mattered when the creature she was tracking left such a convenient trail of glowing slime.

This particular beastie was actually so easy to track that Meenah would have preferred to leave it for later in favor of finding that thing that looked like a praying mantis crossed with a giant squid, but Aranea had seen the glowing winged slug thing the size of a small elephant in passing and insisted on catching it, or at least getting ahold of its corpse. Aranea was like that a lot, seeing something that caught her interest or gave her an idea and insisting on it, and her ideas were worthwhile as often as not, so Meenah had gone along. The creature was surprisingly fast, but Meenah was keeping pace, and was flushing it out towards the tunnel under 45th Avenue, where her colleagues awaited. Any minute now, the creature that was fleeing her would run into them.

As if something out there had heard her thinking, there were sounds of violence ahead of her. She broke into a sprint and caught up to where Porrim was dodging the creature’s rush and carving a three-foot gash into its side. Meenah had been right in thinking that there was no way it could actually fly on those wings, but they still helped the creature pounce with a speed and grace that was frankly out of place on a giant slug monster. Meenah stepped in to try and stab the thing, and discovered that the wings were also hard and stiff, and very good for buffeting people in the face. The third wing-related discovery, that her trident could still tear them like old curtains, was much more heartening.

Aranea said something about sangria or something in Latin and gestured at the slug monster, and its wounds all started bleeding by the gallon. The creature shrieked and spun off of its uninjured wing into a sidelong roll in the air, trying to crush Meenah. She got her hands up in time, though, catching the beast and heaving it over her head and behind her with all her highblood strength. It hit the floor hard and tried to run for it; Aranea cast another spell, and the paving stones in the floor leapt up to pinch the creature’s body and hold it in place. Before it could pull itself free, Meenah took a flying leap and jammed her trident into what she really hoped was its brain.

The monster spasmed for a moment, then slumped dead. Oh, good, that had been the brain.

“Well, that was fun.” said Porrim, as she and Aranea walked over to inspect the carcass.

“Yeah, who doesn’t love a good monster hunt.” said Meenah. “You get what you wanted, Aranea?”

“One moment, I have to check. Porrim, if you wouldn’t mind shedding a little light on the situation?”

Porrim chuckled a little and brought her rainbow drinker glow to full intensity. Aranea immediately set about poking and prodding at the corpse, examining the wings and the mouth and casting little spells. Meenah didn’t see the point. It was a big ugly monster; she had seen plenty of those before. 

After a minute or so, Aranea stood up straight and dusted off her hands.

“Well, that settles it. I had suspected as much as soon as I saw it, but this confirms it. This creature is a hybrid of _Lumens novascotium_ and _Muruserpere rapaci_ .” Aranea delivered this statement with the air of someone making a grand pronouncement. Meenah and Porrim just looked at her blankly.

Aranea sighed. “The Nova Scotian glowslug and the sabrewinged cave glider?” she prompted.

Meenah had heard of cave gliders and glowslugs before, but she didn’t see the significance.

“Is there something special about such a crossbreed?” Porrim asked.

“They’re not even in the same phylum! Not to mention that New York is well outside the normal range of both parent species, and said ranges don’t overlap at all. It’s as if we had found a cross between a European lobster and a vampire bat!” Aranea’s eyes gleamed with intellectual curiosity.

Meenah understood it now. “So what you’re saying is, someone must have made this thing.”

“Precisely.”

Meenah thought about it for a second.

“Buoy,” she said, “this is gonna be an interesting one.”

\--------------------

The next few days were indeed interesting ones. The three of them had their hands full trying to kill enough of the creatures infesting the sewers to keep attacks to a minimum. There was a truly ludicrous variety of the things, too; even Meenah, who was indifferent to zoology at best, had noticed it. New York’s monsters were usually assorted varieties of giant rodent and insect, with the occasional shoggoth or stray harpy. But lately, you could find anything down there. There were hybrid creatures of all sorts, with parent species pulled from every corner of the globe, crossed with gleeful disregard for the laws of biology. There was definitely some kind of mad scientist at work, or possibly even a cabal of them.

And Meenah, Aranea, and Porrim had no fucking clue on how to find them.

Aranea had tried every tracking and detection spell she knew, but had gotten nowhere; New York, like most great cities, had such a thick miasma of magic everywhere that you needed an actual piece of someone in order to find them, and they had no such thing from their mystery villain. Trying to track the creatures the old-fashioned way through the ridiculous maze of tunnels was equally futile, since New York, like any city that had a decent-sized population of trolls living in it for more than a century or so, had all sorts of unofficial and unmapped tunnels dug by them. (Trolls liked having their own spaces, were good at construction projects, didn’t mind the dark as much, and had a much broader definition of ‘habitable’ than humans.) You could track a creature for a little ways, enough to hunt it, but the mess and the maze killed any trail long before it got back to the original point of origin. They had gone around all of the magic shops great and small, searching and occasionally intimidating the clerks into letting them look for shipments of the supplies that were used in magical biological experiments. But there were no leads there either.

The only thing left to do was to keep hunting monsters in order to keep the city safe, and keep dissecting and examining the ones they killed for clues. 

The three of them were dissecting a monster right now; by which Meenah meant that Aranea was dissecting it while she and Porrim stood around and watched. The creature laid out on the table was apparently a hybrid of a giant sandswimmer lizard and an Arctic borer, according to Aranea. It was a sort of giant gecko-looking thing about five feet long, with thick craggy scales in mottled colors that it could change a little for camouflage, and a maw of tiny, needle-like teeth that dripped acid. It was an excellent climber, could burrow right through solid rock, and was pretty good at ambushes; Meenah could still feel the acid burns tingling on her shoulder.

“Well, this is disturbing.” said Aranea, standing up from her seat by the examination table.

“Yeah, no shit.” said Meenah.

“Well, beyond the obvious ways, I mean.” Aranea clarified. “Firstly, while I can’t be certain of the fact without a practical test, this creature appears to have been reproductively viable.”

“I thought that hybrids were often sterile, particularly when the parent species are very different.” said Porrim.

“So did I, but apparently whoever is making these had better ideas.” Aranea shook her head. “Which gets into my second point. These creatures aren’t being crossed at random. In fact, there appears to have been a lot of thought put into the choice of which creatures to mix.”

“What do you mean?” Porrim asked.

“I mean, take this specimen, for example.” Aranea gestured at the corpse. “The giant sandswimmer is a highly specialized ambush predator native to the hot deserts of the southwest United States and northern Mexico, notable for its camouflage and incredible burrowing skills. Its weaknesses are its lack of aggression, cold-bloodedness, and inability to tackle large prey. The Arctic borer is an aggressively territorial predator native to Scandinavia and northern Russia, which uses its acid to create traps and pitfalls and attack creatures that fall in. The combination of the two creates an aggressive all-climate predator, with acid that can take down larger prey when used in combination with its teeth, and a burrowing ability also improved by acid to the point that it can move around in solid rock. It’s a superpredator. Every hybrid we’ve run into seems to have been made with the purpose of being some sort of ridiculous apex predator. It’s almost as if someone was trying to bring to life their doodles of the animals they made up while bored in biology class; it would be comical if they weren’t so dangerous.”

Meenah pondered that for a moment.

“With this many predators, they must be having trouble finding enough food down in the tunnels.” she said. “That’s why they’ve been attacking people in the city.”

“So it would seem.” Aranea sighed and sat down heavily. 

“We’d better figure out who’s behind this soon.” Porrim said. “Before any of them manage to establish a breeding population, and we never get rid of them.”

\------------------

More days passed, and they still hadn’t really made any progress. Aranea in particular was getting frustrated with the inability of her magic to help find their mystery mad scientist, and spent most of her spare time combing through books looking for obscure divination tricks. Porrim had been staking out zoos and having her contacts on the docks look for where all of the animals that were presumably being used to make the hybrids were coming from, but she hadn’t turned anything up yet. And Meenah was taking on the main responsibility of killing the more aggressive monsters before they could cause any trouble, a task that was increasingly starting to feel like trying to empty a lagoon with a bucket in the middle of a rainstorm. Hell, just today she had accounted for another one of the acid lizard things, two giant venomous scaled eagles, a super-giant lamprey with centipede legs and no less than five different breath weapons, a pack of oversized wolves with six extra-jointed legs that could shoot webs and climb walls, and an alligator. (The alligator had admittedly just been for lunch.) And yet, there had still been three separate attacks on the surface, and people were starting to get antsy. They needed to get to the bottom of this, and soon.

Meenah was sitting in the office, scraping lamprey goop out of her hair and marking the locations of every known monster attack and sighting on a map of the city, looking for some kind of pattern. The only pattern she could see at the moment was ‘Holy shit, that’s a lot.’ Not the most helpful insight. 

Porrim walked in, back from another day searching the docks.

“Anything?” Meenah asked.

“The most exotic animals shipped to New York in the last six months, legal or otherwise, are a few big cats, some tropical birds, and a case of saffron grubs. Nothing that would allow the breeding of the creatures we’re fighting.”

“Damn.”

“I presume that this is a map of the attacks.” Porrim leaned over to take a look.

“Yeah.” said Meenah. “Feel free to tell me if you sea any patterns, because I can’t.”

Porrim looked it over for a minute.

“I think I see something, actually. Do you have these listed by time?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Meenah handed over the list, and Porrim started rearranging the pins in the map, sorting them by time using different colors.

“Well, isn’t that interesting.” she said.

Meenah looked. The attacks had started off being spread more or less evenly, but as time went on, there was one particular neighborhood in Brooklyn that started to stand out as an island of calm in the storm.

“Now what do you suppose could be causing that?” Porrim asked.

“Well, that is the neighborhood where I’m told the Midnight Crew usually hangs out.” Meenah pointed out.

Meenah had never met the Midnight Crew in person, but she had heard things. They were strange, in the way of people who weren’t quite all the way human, and they were notoriously vicious towards their fellow gangsters. Could they be setting monsters loose to take out the competition? A lot of crime hideouts were in basements and tunnels, after all. That seemed a pretty likely theory to her actually. A good mob could get stuff in without notice, do freaky experiments, and let the things loose, violently training them to attack the rest of the city.

“I reckon we otter head on over and take a look, don’t you think?” said Meenah.

The three private eyes spent the next day focusing on that particular part of Brooklyn, searching around its edges. There were a whole lot of monsters that were avoiding or leaving the area; it seemed that they had been haphazardly trained to do so by the array of gunshot and stab wounds they had received.

As they chased off a couple of weird cat-ants the size of wolves with catlike paws, eyes, and jaws, Meenah turned to Aranea. 

“So, do you think it might be them?”

“It’s possible.” Aranea said. “I don’t know a whole lot about the Midnight Crew, but I suppose it isn’t inconceivable that one of them could know a bit about magic. Though it would be strange that no one had heard of such a person before. Whatever techniques are being used to make these creatures must be incredibly advanced or unique; I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“This is the only lead we’ve had this whole time, it’s gotta be them.” said Meenah.

“That isn’t necessarily true.” Porrim pointed out. “It might just be a-”

“Shhh!” Meenah hushed her. “I hear something ahead.”

The three of them quieted down and waited. They were in a big cavern, and the sound was coming from down the tunnel leading into it from the other side.

“Slick, we’ve been down here for hours.” said a voice in a clipped tone.

“They’ve gotta be around here somewhere.” a second voice, presumably Slick, shot back.

“There’s a lot of goddamn somewhere to be around in down here, you know.” said the first voice.

“Aw, what’s the matter, Droog, getting tired?” Slick mocked.

“I’m getting kind of tired.” said a third voice.

“Shut up, Deuce.” Slick and Droog said in unison.

The Midnight Crew walked into the cavern, and caught sight of the three of them.

“There you are!” Meenah and Slick yelled at the same time, rushing towards each other, brandishing their weapons.

“Call off your damn menagerie if you want to see tomorrow, sea hag!” shouted Slick, waving a knife at her.

“Me? You’re the one using it to take out the competition, jackass!” Meenah shot back, trident poised to strike.

“What are you, nuts? Do I look like a zookeeper to you, saltswiller?”

“No, you just look like an asshole!”

“Oh, for the love of…” Aranea shook her head and reached out a hand. “Let me just check in his head and- AH!” She screamed and clutched at her temples. Slick grinned with pointed teeth as he withdrew the knife from his arm. It was the best way for a person who didn’t know any magic to defend themselves from mental attacks, if they were quick on the draw and had the nerve; hurt yourself, and whoever was prying into your head got a concentrated dose of painful sensations.

“That’s it!” Meenah yelled.

She lunged at Slick, trident first; he whipped a cast iron horse hitcher out of his jacket and parried. They started going at it hammer and tongs; Slick was a lot stronger than he looked, and between that and the pointed teeth Meenah was sure that he wasn’t all human. They traded insults as well as blows as they went.

“You really think I’m gonna believe that your patch of town is the only one that the monsters are learning to stay away from just by chance?” said Meenah, as Slick hopped over her attempt to trip him with the haft of her trident.

“You really think I’m gonna believe that a sea hag, a witch, and a drinker wandering around the tunnels in the middle of a monster invasion have nothing to do with it?” Slick shot back, as Meenah leaned away from a swipe of the knife in his offhand.

“Uh, boss?” said Deuce, looking nervously off to the side.

“The city’s paying us to get rid of the fuckin’ things, asshole!” said Meenah, as her stab slashed the outside of Slick’s shoulder.

“So you’re scamming the city, too? Great, but keep it out of my way!” Slick managed to whack her in the ribs with the horse hitcher; nothing broke, but it would sure leave a mark.

“Ah, Meenah,” said Aranea, looking in the same direction as Deuce, “you might want to take a look at this.”

“Fuck you, lowlife, you reelly think I’m gonna take that from you?” Meenah knocked Slick to the floor with an overhand blow.

“Ah, go to hell!” Slick threw a knife at her, then swept her ankles out from under her while she was focused on dodging it.

“Hey, jerks!” Droog yelled, with some urgency, also looking off to the side.

They both ignored him as they clambered to their feet. Meenah went for another stab, and Slick’s horse hitcher arced in to counter it.

There was a loud clang as both weapons bounced off of Porrim’s interposing sword.

“Ahem.” she said politely, pointing off to the side.

Meenah and Slick both turned to look. The weird cat-ant things from earlier were back, and they had brought friends. Lots of friends. Big ones, too.

“Ah, fuck.” said Meenah and Slick.

The ant-things swarmed them all. Droog opened up with a tommy gun, the big guy pulled out a shotgun, and Deuce started pecking away with a handgun. They fared a lot better than the unlucky NYPD officers had at the start of it all, since they had better guns and were better shots, and could manage to pull out a melee weapon if something got too close; Meenah saw Droog beat a monster to death with a pool cue, and the big guy take one out with an axe. Aranea’s spells lashed out with fire and light, and sent pieces of rock crushing and scything through the creatures. Still, the most efficient way to fight monsters was usually to cut them up, and that was what the rest of them were doing, Porrim blazing through their ranks with her sword, while Meenah and Slick cut their way towards the bigger monsters, still bickering with each other.

“You had to call in your monster pals for backup, huh?” Slick accused, while he caved in a monster’s skull.

“Do I look like I have any conchrol over these things?” Meenah retorted, as she stabbed a creature trying to bite her face off.

Slick actually seemed to consider that one.

“And anyhow, you’re probably happy that you get another chance to train your monsters.” Meenah went on, scything through the last couple of ants between the two of them and the biggest one.

“Do I look happy about this?” Slick snarled as he pinned one of the big one’s legs to the floor.

Meenah actually considered that one as she ducked under the monster’s other leg and stabbed it through the head.

The other two big ones were down, too; Aranea had pinned one to the floor with a spell while Porrim filleted it, and the other had finally fallen after the rest of the Midnight Crew had pumped what must have been at least five hundred rounds into it. Damn, those guys could throw around some violence. There was only the main body of the swarm left, but they weren’t running away.

“Aranea, can you school them together?” Meenah called.

Aranea answered by conjuring up a rush of wind that swirled around and gathered the monsters up, while the rest of them moved away. The things were all in one place now, maybe they could-

“Deuce!” yelled Slick.

“Right!” said Deuce, cheerfully, as he whipped out a pair of dynamite bombs and threw them into the crowd.

There was a thunderous boom, and that was that. Slick crowed in triumph as he crushed a half-dead stray monster under his heel.

Slick and Meenah looked at each other for a minute as they caught their breath.

“Hell, you’re actually not behind this, are you?” said Slick.

“Nope.” said Meenah. “You’re just trying to keep the monsters out of your hair, aren’t you.”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause.

“Well, this was pointless.” said Porrim.

“Hey, we killed a bunch of stuff. That’s never pointless.” Meenah said.

“Yeah, what she said.” Slick agreed.

“Having gotten a good look at them,” said Aranea, “I don’t think that any of the Midnight Crew have the necessary expertise to create these things. No offense.”

“Eh.” Droog shrugged.

Slick looked around. 

“Well, that was fun.” he said. “See you around.”

And with that, he and the Midnight Crew unceremoniously turned around and left.

And Meenah and the others were back to square one.

\----------------

Three days later, and Meenah was well and truly sick of this whole affair. The damn things just kept coming. One had even gotten out and attacked the opera house, and been killed by the rival sleuthing firm in a ridiculous escapade involving three chandeliers, a molasses bomb, and a giant bust of Louis Armstrong. They were getting all sorts of press out of it too, the lucky fuckers.

Aranea had had to talk the mayor out of flooding the sewer and tunnel systems by pointing out that not only would it likely collapse parts of the city, it wouldn’t actually kill most of the creatures. Still, the public was getting a little frantic. A few of the damn things, including the cat-ant fuckers and the acid lizards, had apparently managed to establish breeding populations.

Meenah was bearing the brunt of the work in keeping the things down, too. Aranea was getting increasingly desperate in her magical research; and on the other end, a number of monsters had figured out that the local mother grub was a good place for easy meals, and while Porrim had left for a reason she still had enough regard for her former colleagues to coordinate the defenses.

They had to find whoever was behind this, and fast. Meenah was using some of her scarce spare time to rack her brains. They had checked the docks, the rails, the underworld, the magic shops and archives, the government, everything! There was nothing! There were no trails they could follow, and Aranea had declared that whatever magic was behind this was completely foreign to her.

At this rate, they were going to have to bring the army in or something. Unknown villains, unknown magic…

Wait.

Meenah had an idea.

She went back around to the magic shops, asking a different set of questions; and on the sixth one, she got what she wanted.

“What do you mean, weird stuff?” said Lucky Luke, the proprietor of Black Cat Magical Supply. “It’s a magical supply shop, you’ll have to be more specific.”

“Something you don’t understand at all.” said Meenah. “Something that makes you go ‘what the shell could this possibly be for,’ you know.”

After all, if the magic behind this was unknown to Aranea, it was definitely unknown to everyone else.

Luke thought for a moment.

“There is this one order. I didn’t even know what alchemically-catalyzed calcium chloride was, but some guy’s been ordering it at a hundred pounds a week for months now. Not to mention all those weird preservation reagents and the magically modified phosphates I had to look up how to make.”

“Who’s ordering it?” Meenah demanded.

“I don’t know, it’s anonymous.”

Meenah goggled at him. “You let an order that big be anonymous?”

“He paid up front in cash the first time, and he’s been very reliable! Besides, it’s a magic shop, half the clientele are anonymous.”

Meenah sighed. “When’s the next order going out?”

“There’s one set up right now out back.” Luke pointed out the window at a pallet of bags and boxes. “Gets picked up overnight, no idea who does it. They just take it and leave an envelope full of money under the door.”

Well, that was a stroke of luck. Meenah left the store and headed towards Brooklyn. She had a lead, but it would be risky to try and follow it alone, and Porrim and Aranea were busy. But she knew someone who was as annoyed about the monsters as her.

She caught up with Spades Slick in a speakeasy, playing cards. The rest of the Midnight Crew were apparently somewhere else.

“Hey, Slick.” said Meenah.

Slick looked up from his cards, which Meenah could see were marked.

“Peixes. What the hell do you want?”

“I think I’ve found a way to solve our mutual problem, but I could use an extra fin.”

Slick rolled his eyes at the fish pun, but otherwise looked interested.

“Where’s the rest of your crew?” he asked.

“Busy. Where’s yours?”

“Busy.” said Slick. “Will the two of us be enough?”

“Reckon so.”

“Right.”

Slick stood up and gathered up the pot from the table.

“Hey!” said one of the other players.

“Ah, I was winning anyway. Unless you care to argue with me about it.” Slick grinned menacingly at him, and he thought better of it.

“Thought so.” 

Slick and Meenah walked out, and Meenah explained things to him as they went.

\--------------

A few hours later, around midnight, Meenah and Slick were staking out Black Cat Magical Supply’s backyard. There had been a commotion a few blocks over as some monster got out and wreaked havoc, but they had to ignore it. They couldn’t risk missing this.

There was a clank and a clunk, as the manhole cover on the nearby street popped open, and a half dozen Servitors popped out. 

Well, that explained some things. A Servitor was an undead servant, not very bright but very reliable. They were durable, strong, not very hard to make as long as you had some intact dead bodies, and exuded a magical essence of death strongly enough that even the really unpleasant monsters tended to avoid them.

They were also eight different kinds of illegal, because they worked by trapping a fragment of the deceased’s soul inside, which was apparently an exceptionally unpleasant time for it. But that hardly stopped anyone, even outside of the mad scientist club.

The Servitors picked up the load of supplies, left an envelope of money under the door, and left back into the sewers. Meenah and Slick followed (Slick stopped to steal the envelope first).

The two of them followed the creatures deep into the sewers, in a spiralling path so convoluted that Meenah had no idea how to get back to the surface within five minutes. At least the Servitors’ essence was keeping the monsters away, and the things were too dumb to notice they were being followed. 

After nearly an hour, the Servitors rounded a corner. Meenah and Slick followed, and-

Nothing. The two of them were suddenly alone, hopelessly lost beneath the city, with the Servitors vanished.

“Oh, well isn’t that just great!” Slick threw up his hands in exasperation. “Where the hell did they go?”

Meenah looked around frantically, but there was no sign of them. Where- wait. She felt something. It was a familiar feeling, a don’t-look-at-me sort of feeling, the same kind produced by the spells Aranea used when she wanted a private corner somewhere. And Meenah knew how to counter that.

Letting her mind wander, Meenah turned aimlessly, until she faced the direction that felt most right. Then she pinched herself hard and turned around. There it was; a heavy oak door with a spell talisman hung over it. Slick had noticed what she was doing and followed suit.

The two of them slipped inside. And holy shit, what a sight. Rows of massive cages, full of half-grown and full-grown monsters of all varieties, and vats of embryonic ones. They were being tended by a bunch of harried and ragged-looking young people. Meenah and Slick waited till one was alone, then grabbed him and ducked behind a corner, Meenah’s hand over his mouth.

“Don’t even think about screaming.” said Slick, brandishing a knife.

Meenah let him go, and he almost sobbed with relief.

“Oh thank God, I thought no one would ever find us.” he said.

“What the hell’s going on down here?” Meenah asked.

“A few months ago, Doctor Poindexter told us all that he’d make sure we graduated no matter what if we helped him with a project of his.”

“Are you students?”

“Graduate students, at NYU. He told us we would be collecting specimens of rare lichens, but when we got down here, he locked us in, told us he’d faked paperwork saying we were all on a long-term research trip in the Adirondacks, and made us help him with his screwy monster project.”

“And you just let him?” Meenah asked, a bit judgmentally.

“We can’t fight his magic! Or his Servitors. And we have no idea how to get back to the surface from here, and he only started keeping the door unlocked once there were too many monsters to use the tunnels safely. James tried it anyhow a week ago, and we never heard from him again.”

Oh, so the doc was a magic user. Great.

“Where’s the doctor now?” Meenah asked.

“His private section is over there.” The grad student pointed to another door on the other side of the room. “Please, you’ve got to help us!”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Come on, Slick.”

The two of them walked up to the door, ragged grad students turning to look at them in awe as they went, hopeful whispers rising in their wake.

Meenah kicked the door down, and she and Slick strode inside. This room was a lot nicer than the last one. There was a wall with shelves full of animal parts and vials of goo labeled with the names of animals; ordinary non-hybrid monsters. The next section had lots of weird chemicals, and new vials labeled with the names of hybrid monsters. Was the doctor able to combine the creatures using only samples instead of the animals themselves, then grow them in the vats that were in the other room? That would explain why they hadn’t been able to track the import of any exotic creatures.

Doctor Poindexter, a tall white man in half-moon spectacles, was a ways down, injecting something into a petri dish. He turned and looked up at their approach.

“What the-” he started.

“The jig’s up, doc!” said Meenah. “Come quietly and we might not hurt you too bad.”

“You can’t stop me!” cried Poindexter, the light of madness in his eyes. “Take this!” He thrust a hand at them, and a big wave of pure telekinetic force rushed out at them. Oh, good, he was only a mage, not a witch. Pity there hadn’t been time to fetch Aranea from her trip to the out-of-town library; she could have literally won with a snap of her fingers. Mages could create magical energy, but had very limited control over it; a witch was to a mage what a hydrokinetic was to a guy with a hose. 

Of course, a guy with a hose could still get you pretty wet if you weren’t careful. Meenah and Slick dove away in separate directions as Poindexter’s attack tore up the floor around them.

“Servitors! Kill them!” the doctor shrieked.

The half dozen Servitors lumbered away from the wall, heading for Meenah, who was closer.

“Hah! You’ll never beat- ah!” Poindexter was cut off when Slick threw a knife at him and he had to duck. Slick kept throwing knives and advancing.

“I’ll keep on him,” he called to Meenah, “you take the Servitors.”

“Works for me.”

The Servitors were both easy and tricky. On the one hand, they were slow, and didn’t even try to dodge her blows. On the other hand, they were hard to bring down, didn’t feel pain, and never stopped coming. She managed to take the first one down with a half dozen brutal trident stabs, but she had nearly gotten her weapon stuck, barely dodged a few blows from the other five, and was getting uncomfortably close to the wall. She had to try a different tactic.

Oh, duh. Why was she stabbing an undead that didn’t have to worry about damaging its organs? She switched to bludgeoning them with the haft of her trident, breaking their legs one by one, then methodically bashing their heads in as they flailed helplessly on the floor.

On the other side of the room, Slick had dodged his way within arm’s reach of Poindexter, and raised his knife for a stab. The doctor telekinetically caught it, but Slick just kicked him in the family pearls, then punched him in the face as he reeled in pain. Meenah strode over as Poindexter fell backwards onto the floor and planted the butt of her weapon on his chest.

“Anything to say for yourself, doc?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter.” Poindexter giggled through the blood. “When my colleagues see what I’ve done here, they’ll regret laughing at me! I’ll get papers in every journal, prizes, funding, maybe even…” His voice dropped to a reverent whisper. “...Tenure.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you have to worry about that.” said Meenah.

“Oh, please.” Poindexter laughed. “I’m a doctor at New York University! What, do you think you can just up and murder me, simply because I’m helpless and there aren’t any witnesses? As if!”

Meenah looked at Slick. Slick looked at Meenah. And they both turned to look at Poindexter, matching sharp-toothed grins widening on their faces.

“Oh dear.” said Poindexter, weakly.

One murder later, and they were examining the room. Slick was looting everything that looked valuable, while Meenah looked over the late doctor’s bedroom. He had a nice place set up for himself here; cozy, well-stocked, there was even a telephone.

“So how do we get out of here?” Slick asked, carrying a sack of stolen goods. 

Meenah looked around. There was a partial map of the tunnel system, including one bolthole that apparently had one end right behind the bookshelf in the doc’s bedroom. She pulled it aside and pointed up the ladder.

“This should go right to NYU’s campus.” she said. 

Slick nodded and mounted the ladder. 

“You coming?” he asked.

“No, I’ve gotta finish up here. You want any credit for this in the papers?”

“No. Pleasure working with you, Peixes.” Slick disappeared up the ladder.

Meenah turned to the phone. Aranea should have just been getting back to her house about now. A few rings later, and she picked up.

“Hello?” she asked tiredly.

“Hey, it’s me. You’ve still got some of those drops of my blood you can use to find me in an emergency, right?”

“Yeah, why? Are you alright?” Aranea asked.

“Just fine. But I need you to get to me right away. And bring some reporters with you.”

\--------------------

The next day’s headlines were very gratifying. Source Of Monsters Found; City Relieved, said the Times, complete with a lovely photograph of Meenah standing in front of the monster cages, heroically brandishing her trident. The city paid them a massive reward, and a bunch of civic organizations were similarly enthusiastic. Meenah had been invited to no less than eleven banquets in her honor, and had been handed several awards.

The late Doctor Poindexter’s colleagues were indeed quite interested in his work (even if Meenah was pretty sure that Aranea had secreted away a lot of the more interesting bits for herself before they got there), though rather than being awed by him, they mostly seemed equal parts sad and annoyed. Apparently he had done his work by combining some of the most recent developments in mundane biology with traditional magical methods and flooding it all with magic in a particular way.

There were still a few monsters in the sewers, but they were quickly dealt with, and without the doc’s operation they died out quickly. The burrowing acid-lizards and the cat-ant thingies had managed to get enough of a breeding population to stick around, but the laws of ecology brought their numbers to a more manageable level soon enough. Aranea got to pick their scientific names; the acid-lizards were now _Talpalacerta acidus_ , and the cat-ants were _Literalis myrmeleontidus_ ; the latter name was apparently hilarious for the scientist types.

And best of all, anyone who needed a supernatural problem dealt with came flocking to the door of M. Peixes, A. Serket, and P. Maryam. They might have to get a bigger office.

**Author's Note:**

> The taxonomic names are all in Google Translate-assisted Canus Latinicus, I'm afraid. Literalis myrmeleontidus= literally an antlion.
> 
> Up next, whenever I get around to writing it: Road trip, politics, eldritch conspiracies, and AraFef. See you then!


End file.
